SWTOR issues

Memory leaks.

One of the biggest problems with swtor at this moment in certain area´s / places it suffers from a problem causing memory leaks. While there is nothing you can do ingame about this there are some simple but affective tools out there to prevent these issues.
The program is called Memory Cleaner. And what it affectively does is if you set it up right (which is fairly easy) it can trim your working process working set. There is also and option to clear your system cache. Its a lightweight tool so it wont cause any issues in that regard. And it has a few options that wont require you to exit SWTOR every time it crashes. One of them if SWTOR exceeds 80% of the ram it will auto do a trim or a clear. These options ofcourse can be easily turned on / off.

There is currently not a solution to this problem for some reason for certain people the graphics card simply is not being used at all. Only way you can get some preformance out of them is bump up the AA to the highest settings (And this doesnt even always work). That said it still hardly uses the GPU then.

Another issue that has not been fixed/ has not solution to it currently. What happens for certain people is that the moment they hit the play button on the character screen. They go to the loading screen and then it just crashes to the desktop screen. While if you check the task manager the application is still running in the background. It can also happen when entering certain story area's.

On a note if you are getting these black screens be carefull they can seriously harm your graphics card:

Well, it seems all the lockups and hard reboots and whatnot have taken their toll. My video card seems to be fried (it has severe visual artifacts, and crashes during any DirectX/3D content now) so I've got to replace it (Radeon HD 6970 bought just last June) before I can run any game again.

Just a warning: If your system is black screening after the character selection screen locking up your system, WAIT until BioWare says they've patched this before bothering to launch the game.

My wife's going to hit the roof.

PC consistently or even periodically resets itself during SWTOR.

With this it means boom reboot (blue screen etc.) . There is a thread currently on the forums about this and for everybody experiencing these issues please fill out the form here:

While the reason for crashes or causes to this vary alot it generally does seem to come down to overheating issues. Mostly related to the graphics card. And before people ask this is indeed a contradictory to the graphics card not being used at all.
Besides this its most of the time related to a hardware issue.

Better know as "error code 9000" causes people to DC regularly from every 5 minutes to every 2 hours. It varies greatly from person to person. After a DC with this error, alot of people report the lack of all sound / only hearing ambient sound.
Besides the lack of sounds portrait frames can turn black and the NPC's turn unresponsive.

While this might not be the biggest issue for alot of people (and i agree with that). The fact that this even (before the ability delay fix) influenced the lag alot is just bad game design. If you on the other hand look at wow and do the exact same thing. Spamming your C buttton you wont suffer any FPS problem. Not even any sort of FPS reduction.

2 + 3. I want to combine these since both have to do with the fact that the game somehow doesnt handle multiple people 16+ in one and the same area (small area)well. And because of this people suffer from a incredible FPS drop.

4+5 Im also combining these two. There are certain issues like a weird glitch in the cinematic mode, like weird black flickering in the background. Also complete parts of the world (buildings etc.) flicker for certain people. You can also experience weird fps drops while taking a taxi ride which appears as stuttering.

What it comes down to something is for people generally with quite high end systems. Preventing them from getting a reasonably well FPS. If you wonder what about lowering settings for some people it helps for others it has no affect. The reason for the Low FPS is still not know an the guide for people that should have been released as early as yesterday has still not been released. But not alot of people have faith in this guide. For good reason, pretty much everything has been tried. From running Window Media center / Fraps together with SWTOR to completely buying new graphics cards . For now nothing for these people seems to resolve the issue. And as a developer has stated they dont expect a " Miracle fix" to this issue any time soon. Does this mean they wont keep trying to improve it ofcourse not. Only for now there doesnt seem to be an easy fix.

SO what is the cause of this? Well there is alot of guessing most people blaim it on the Game engine which is a fork of the Hero-engine (heavily modified). But when bioware obtained the engine ages ago, it wasnt ready according to the Hero-Engine site:

“It’s not productized yet,” we told Gordon. “There are whole sections of code that is only roughed in and not optimized for performance or security. And there are very few comments and very little documentation.”

He didn’t care. “We are going to have tons of engineers. We can finish it ourselves. We’re going to want to modify your source code for our special project anyway.”

While probably bioware tweaked the engine alot which is quite obvious by the fact it supports multiple cores now and back then the Hero-engine did not. There is something fishy with the engine. Since people with insane specs have issues while people with medio-core machines run the game just fine.

On the other side like synthaxx pointed out in the other thread the game uses 2 processes while it could have only used 1.

Originally Posted by Synthaxx

The process space for 32-bit processes is limited to 2GB by default UNLESS the LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE header is in place. With that header in place, you can utilise up to 3GB on a 32-bit system. On a 64-bit system, this header allows up to 4GB of memory to be addressed even if the application is 32-bit, but only if the header is in place.

Now, this doesn't mean you can't address more than that amount of space without the header. It just means you can't do it with just one process.

I've not got SWToR installed so i can't check personally, but i get the idea from a quick search that it is LAA enabled. This would lead me to believe that Bioware have really gone out of their way to offload onto a secondary process, possibly not realising that in fact, they have 3GB to go at on all systems. If i'm honest though, it seems more like they didn't put the required amount of work into the true technical side and instead just ripped off a "public" engine failing to realise the shortcomings.

You can have all the graphic and 3D designers in the world but if you've not got a proper team of coders working at the real low level of the engine itself, you end up with a shitstorm of complaints about poor performance. To have the same issue from 5% of the playerbase is simply unacceptable. It's not like it's lots of different issues, where you could shrug it off as issues specific to an individual system, but the same technical issue for 1/20 players from a company as big as Bioware.
.....

For people looking for small fixes and a tiny improvement in fps i would suggest to watch:

In the end dont get me wrong, and this thread is not meant to be hatefull and please dont see it that way. I just wanted to point out some problems. And if there in the future fixes become available i will edit the thread. I only for now have the feeling that certain area's should have been looked at better during beta. And even fixed before release. Since even if its only 1/20th of the SWTOR players who have issues preformance wise because of the game (some % i still think is made up out of thin air). I would feel a better interaction between bioware/EA and the consumer would go a long way to end some of the rage about preformance issues on the forums.

However, my brother, who is running the game on a weak AMD Phenom core and a 768 mb GTX 460 gfx card, is running the game just as fine as me. Obviously he can't turn the graphics up sky high as I can, but he's game is running on 60 FPS constantly.
No one in my guild has experienced most of the issues you've mentioned (The black box on portait is a bug most of us won't even pay attention to).
I know one however, who had almost every major issue, and here's what he did;

1) - Updated every single driver on his PC. It is not much work, even my grandmother updates her drivers regulary.
2) - Clean up the Harddrive. Defragmentation and the CleanUp tool within windows can do wonders to your PC's performance.
3) - Patience. Fixes are coming out on mostly a weekly basis (people denying this are not paying attention to the login client). The game is only a month old, even WoW was bugged to heaven at this point as well (Actually Vanilla was filled with bugs and issues the whole time).